He’ll never get to play football with Tom Brady on Super Bowl Sunday. He’ll never play a round of golf at Augusta National with Tiger Woods.

But Greg Swartz will run with champions on Monday in the 117th running of the Boston Marathon.

Athletes in wheelchairs and the elite runners will get an early start on the race before the rest of the pack hears the starting gun at 10 a.m.

“They’ll be done long before I get close to Boston but it’s still the same event and race and somewhere among the names your name is there with everyone else,” said Swartz, 51, of Stoughton.

Swartz will lace up for his fourth marathon, his third Boston Marathon, in three years.

It all began one night four years ago while he was sitting in bed with his wife watching contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” NBC’s extreme weight loss reality competition, run a marathon.

He said, “If they can do it, I can.”

“My wife laughed and said, ‘good luck with that,’” Swartz recalled.

The next day Swartz, who hadn’t run since high school track, started training. It took him six months to get all the way around D.W. Field Park in Brockton without stopping.

He ran a 5-kilometer race, then a 10-kilometer and then a half marathon – 13.1 miles.

“When I completed that half marathon, I thought the people who did full marathons were absolutely insane,” Swartz said. “But I followed the training program and now I’m hooked.”

Swartz said before his first marathon run in 2011, he, his wife and two kids, 14 and 16, drove the route.

“My kids were like, ‘Dad are you kidding me?’ and we had only gone about 10 miles,” he said.

That first year Swartz ran for the Spaulding Rehabilitation Center. This year he qualified for the Boston Marathon by running a different marathon in the fall in three hours and seven minutes.

“I don’t necessarily enjoy running and I don’t enjoy the training but when race day comes, it is absolutely amazing to be part of all of that,” he said.

Every year is different for Swartz but one thing that is special about Boston, he said, is the crowds.

“You get to Heartbreak Hill and then they’re just nuts at Boston College,” he said. “And then you get to Cleveland Circle and you can see the Citgo sign and you know on the other side of the Citgo sign is the finish line but it just doesn’t get any closer. You just run and run and you’re thinking, ‘This is never going to end’ and then you get to Kenmore Square and it’s berserk and then, boom, you’re done. It’s just incredible.”

Page 2 of 2 - With Monday’s weather forecast looking ideal for running – in the mid- to high 50s – Swartz is hoping for redemption after a disappointing time in 2012 when temperatures soared to 87 degrees. Last year, about 400 runners who had qualified for the race decided to wait a year and try again this year.

“It sounds insane,” Swartz said of the marathon, “but I think everybody should do it.”